With today's growth and advances in image capture devices, digital images are proliferating at a rate nearly equal to that of traditional film-based photographs. Digital scanners and digital still and video cameras with mega-pixel resolutions are becoming more and more affordable, and producing higher and higher quality images.
Conventional film-based photographs and video reels have often been organized and saved in numerous photo albums and “shoe boxes”. As users of digital capture devices accumulate numbers of images into the thousands, organization of their images becomes nearly intractable. Specifically, retrieval of desired images becomes very cumbersome and time consuming.
In order to be able to efficiently retrieve and access their digital images using prior art hardware and software, users are typically required to manually classify images in terms of categories and sub-categories, or by key words or captions, or to manually save them within appropriate file folders and sub-folders. If a user's selection of categories and sub-categories, or folders and sub-folders is not carefully planned, search and retrieval of desired images will be overly time-consuming, and the user may have to re-classify his entire archive of images. Consider, for example, although e-mail can be custom organized into folders and sub-folders, how time consuming it typically is for a user to locate a specific e-mail he received a year ago, within the thousands of e-mails he receives per year; even more so with digital images, which are intended to be preserved for generations.
Thus a major concern of users of digital images today is efficient archival and retrieval, for large image archives over long time spans.